


The Opposite of Pain

by innie



Category: Palm Springs (2020)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25659238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: What she really can't do is wake up defeated.
Relationships: Nyles/Sarah Wilder
Comments: 10
Kudos: 32
Collections: Het Swap Exchange 2020





	The Opposite of Pain

**Author's Note:**

  * For [htbthomas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/htbthomas/gifts).



> This movie was such a melancholy delight, and I'm so pleased to get to write in it for you!

_Pain matters_ , he says, stupid lying Nyles with his big grin and sad eyes. _Pain_ — which is his stupid-ass shorthand for _reality_ — is how he marks the time he doesn't think he wants to be keeping anyway. His whole meaningless existence is a quest to avoid pain from the time he wakes up to the time he falls asleep or dies or somehow resets.

He's not one of the world's great thinkers. She's never seen him crack a book. His philosophizing is of the same quality as a college stoner's — there are no thoughts of actual profundity, just the appearance of depth, which dissipates with the morning light.

She shouldn't be criticizing. She's a fuck-up and before she stumbled into that cave couldn't remember the last time she'd gone a day without a drink or seven. She slept with her sister's idiotic fiancé the night before he was going to vow to love Tala faithfully and whole-heartedly. So it's not like she's got the moral high ground. Maybe she _is_ smarter than he is — what does it matter if she's passively going along with the boundaries he's set for their existence? Or maybe intelligence has nothing to do with it if he's just been ground down by too many November ninths to activate his brain and it's gone into hibernation mode.

The point is: the opposite of pain isn't existence. It's pleasure. And she damn well deserves some.

*

She doesn't have plantar fasciitis — that was her ex's thing, or at least the excuse Barry liked to use when he wanted to sit still and drink while she was coaxing him to get up and shimmy, with or without a bottle of beer in his hand. Barry was a cornfed blond from Iowa — Barry was unimportant — Barry had a way of sneaking into her head, and she really should have expected he'd be popping up at a _wedding_ , which brought back memories of her own. She's got a point to make and it is this: this dipshit dressed for a luau is as different from Barry as it is possible to be, but that doesn't mean she owes him a dance.

No matter how hilarious that line about Tala and Abe looking like siblings was. No matter that she feels a little curl of desire deep in her belly at the way he locks eyes with her and flexes his hips. No matter that he's making it clear that it's her or no one, that he's dancing only for her benefit.

It's the seductiveness of it — well, really, how seductive _she_ finds it to have a go-for-broke guy's full attention on her; no one else at this wedding, she's willing to bet, would be at all charmed by his moves — that gets her back up. He doesn't even _know_ her, and she certainly hadn't asked him to swoop in and take the microphone in her stead. She's not in his debt, and he has a girlfriend anyway. A really fucking stupid girlfriend who thinks she's part of the family because Tala is too nice to people, starting with Pia and Misty and ending with her.

Fucking Misty's Fucking Boyfriend is probably just responding to whatever pheromones are in her stupid Orchid Explosion hair mist. She's never going to use the stuff again, will never smell like this particular blend of sex and death ever again, and if that's all he's after, he and his flower-power shirt and banana-yellow trunks can fuck right off.

(It would be so easy, though, to unknot the drawstring and slide those trunks down his legs, to dip her head and open her mouth, to feel his thighs shake and his hips try to stay still. She could see, when he danced, the outline of his dick, knows he'd be thick enough to get her jaw to ache in that satisfying way. He looks like the type to cradle her head in his hands, and the sweat on his palms would cover the orchid scent she's been trailing around like a banner. She could do it, she could do it right now, and she bets it would be good. But he's taken her rejection as final and turned away. He'll never know what he's missing.)

*

He's generous, is the thing. He buys tacos and candy bars with crisp bills in high denominations, stops at roadside stands to buy fresh fruit and handicrafts and kids' lemonade. He buys her flowers for her hair once — not _once_ : many times, just on the same fucking day — and looks surprised the first time she thanks him by way of a kiss. A real kiss, where she takes her time, doesn't rush and doesn't push, and comes out of it feeling like he's skimmed every inch of her skin with delicate fingertips. She wouldn't have done it if the flowers had been orchids, she says, and it takes him no time to flash that big smile at her.

He follows along with all of her ideas without even looking like he wants to protest. Practicing ridiculously bad dance routines but only halfway — he rolls with it when she says they'll improvise the ending on the spot. Ingesting hallucinogens and riding brontosauruses that are clearly in love. Watching old French movies with the subtitles off to see how much she remembers from high school and new French movies to get tips from the sex scenes. Downing a couple of sleeping pills before diving face-first into an enormous platter of the creamiest, cheesiest mac and cheese the world has ever known so that they don't have to face the consequences of being lactose-intolerant. Smoking up and watching reruns of _Mork and Mindy_.

He smiles when she says it's his turn to pick, smiles and kisses her. Kisses his way down her body, making her bones hum, settling in for the long haul of her machine-gun rapid-fire orgasms, too many stacked together to count individually. She can barely hold on to a single thought when his mouth is on her.

She clings to one, tooth and nail: as good as this is, it isn't enough.

*

She can't keep waking up in Abe's hotel bed, in fucking Palm Springs. (The fact that she's still in her bra really says everything about the quality of the sex.)

She does, though.

So what she really can't do is wake up defeated. 

*

He's grammatically challenged to a ludicrous degree — she'd picked up a lot about language and grammar when she'd been on her quest to conquer quantum physics in general and geodesics and the Cauchy horizon in particular — and he still can't dress himself or tame his hair, but he's caught up to her. It is actually painful, the relief that washes over her when he says she doesn't have to play leader because he's no longer just a follower, the release of tension that's been holding her taut for unnumbered November ninths; _pain matters_. But so too does pleasure: the feel of him in her arms, opening his mouth to her kiss; the concordant bliss of shattering fire that she detonates with a decisive thumb; the ecstatic exhilaration of not knowing if the theory will hold up but having him to hold fast to anyway.

*

She's exhausted, and he doesn't push. Holing up at his safe-house sounds like the second-best idea in the world right now (nothing will _ever_ top her mathematically sound plan to escape the time-loop).

But it's November tenth, and when they're back in the car, chased out of the pool by angry homeowners, he turns to her and says, "Let's get burgers and shakes."

"Wings and beers," she says, just to see what happens next.

"Burgers and shakes," he says firmly. "And Lactaid pills. And drive to Austin and pack up your stuff."

"And go where?"

"Let's just take it one day at a time," he says, flips the visor down, and starts the car.


End file.
